In the 19th century Miss Liberty reminded us that the city represented a beacon of freedom; in the 20th century the movies advertised the skyscrapers’ line as the state-of-the art technology and the symbol of the wealthiest modernity; and in the 21th century the city disguised as the seductive and temptress Big Apple would attract the envy and wrath of the savage attackers of the World Trade Center. Because of all of the above, New York or, better, Nueva York, has also won its place in the imaginary of Hispanic writers and literature.
In the Spanish speaking world of writers and poets, Nueva York represented, since early, the utmost connection to freedom and modernity and a mysterious promise of accomplishment still to be explored. While Spain still brooded over the colony lost to Great Britain, the myth granted that whatever couldn’t be succeeded in the independent but poor Latin American homelands, would find a place in the magical cultural capital of the free, industrial, postÂÁrural world. The huge success of the United States in every area and the sustained failure of Latin America created a synthesis of the old dreams and the actual American dream under the shape of a massive Latin American immigration. As the children of Hispanic immigrants, writers such as the Dominicans Julia Alvarez and Junot Diaz, with spectacular careers in the New York literary landscape, accustomed us to the Hispanic literature written in English, better known as Latino literature. This is often the only Hispanic literary connection to New York. However, before the boom of Latino literature and as early as the mid 19th century, there were several remarkable personal initiatives to explore or live in New York, coming from writers not only belonging to the close Caribbean Hispanic countries, but from countries like Spain and the far away Argentina. The “Nueba Yol" of the poorer Cuban, Dominican and Porto Rican immigrants has been long before the Nueva York of talented Hispanic writers awed by modernity and often dreaming with a freedom they couldn’t find in their own countries, were this freedom of a political, sexual, or artistic nature.
As early as 1840 and later 1865, at the very end of the American Civil War, the great Argentine writer and statesman Domingo Faustino Sarmiento--Ambassador to the United States and a President later--lived in New York. He considered it the model of modern citizenry, noticing among many other things, the freedom with which women were allowed to move around and travel by themselves. His essays exhibited a relentless admiration for the city, soon to be followed by other Latin American intellectuals, no longer looking for their model in Europe but in the surging United States. Another icon of this Hispanic tendency to dream and live New York as a haven of freedom, the Cuban poet and patriot José Marti, would spend some time in Manhattan before freeing his country from the Spanish rule.
Later, along the 20th century, and until our days, the politics of freedom would expand beyond the discussions about colonialism, or the opposition of capitalism to socialism to enter the realm of the most private part of life and art. As the contemporary Colombian writer Jaime Manrique--the author of “Cervantes Street" who also lives in New York--points out in his magnificent book “Maricones eminentes" (“Eminent Maricones") New York became a magnet for writers oppressed not only because of their political beliefs but because of their homosexuality like the talented, amazing Cuban Reynaldo Arenas or the dazzling Argentine Manuel Puig, a too sensitive man to live in the repressive Argentina of his days. Neither was New York an easy city to work and live in, but the struggling Arenas could still come up with a moving testimony of his former life in Communist Cuba in his extraordinary memoir “Antes que anochezca" (“Before Night Falls".) Puig, who tasted success, to a much greater extent, left the remarkable saga of novels inspired by the American movies he admired so much and his New York novel, “Maldición eterna a quien lea estas paginas,(“Eternal Curse on the Reader of These Pages") set in the Village.
Before them, though, earlier in the century in 1929, as an early bird announcing the mood that would come later in the century, New York had the most distinguished visitor, the Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca.
His work “Un poeta en Nueva York has been brought to the English speaking audience’s attention only by the end of the 20th century (A Poet in New York, Translation: Greg Simon and Steven White, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991.) Invited by the University of Columbia, Garcia Lorca spent almost a year in New York and witnessed the 1929 crash.
Garcia Lorca had mixed feelings about the city whose splurge in steel and cement couldn’t compete with the rural images of his beloved Andalusia, and whose racism against the Black had him include Harlem and its inhabitants within his cherished collection of submerged and despised minorities, such as the gypsies that haunted so many of his previous poems. Some of Garcia Lorca’s feelings have been directly exposed by the poet in the lecture he gave in Spain upon his return, “A Poet in New York" (Lecture Translation: Christopher Maurer.): "I have said A Poet in New York when I ought to have said New York in a poet;" "There is nothing more poetic and terrible than the skyscraper’s battle with the heavens that cover them;" "The terrible, cold, cruel part is Wall Street. Rivers of gold flow there from all over the earth, and death comes with it;" "I wanted to write the poem of the black race in North America, and to show the pain the blacks feel to be black in a contrary world;" “…the most important black city in the world, Harlem, where obscenity has an accent of innocence that turns it into something disturbing and religious." Garcia Lorca went through a profound change in New York, coming to terms with his homosexuality and better defining it; he despised certain types of maricas and expressed a moving compassion for those in the closet. His very explicit “Ode to Walt Whitman" as well as many other poems in “A Poet in New York" assess of this change, and the struggles that went with it. This poem was never published in Spain during Garcia Lorca’s lifetime.
A beacon, a call, a halt in the long journey of seeking one’s true self and single destiny, Nueva York has always kept its promises, but not before taking its toll. When AIDS entered the scene, Reynaldo Arenas committed suicide in his apartment of the 44th Street. Before him a disappointed Manuel Puig escaped the city with which he couldn’t come to terms. He flew to Rio de Janeiro first and then to Cuernavaca, Mexico, where he died in 1990, also from the terrible disease and without witnessing the Broadway success of his “Kiss of the Spider Woman" in 1993, a belated New York gift Garcia Lorca himself returned to an already divided Spain in 1930, to be shot in 1936, in a war where he was maybe more punished for his sexual choice rather than for his light and not too remarkable militancy on the side of the Republicanos.
Since 1994, a branch of the prestigious Instituto Cervantes which has been directed among others by the outstanding Spanish writer Antonio Muñoz Molina promotes, in New York, the Spanish language and the work, in Spanish, of Spanish and Latin American writers. Its purpose is to allow Hispanic writers and the Spanish language to compete fairly with English Latino literature. While some Spanish writers like Muñoz Molina and his wellÂÁknown wife, Elvira Lindo, have chosen New York as a temporary home and continue to write in Spanish, Latino writers have abandoned the initial realm of writing about their immigrant experience to write now about life in their native countries. They have returned, to them, with English as a new language and the fresh point of view of one who has confronted a different culture and a more successful country and industry organization. While it becomes more and more difficult to define what a national literature is, global times still leave plenty of space to play the politics of language. Even though New York has grown as the biggest literary market in the planet, only an 8% of its production is a translation from a foreign language.
Like Garcia Lorca, many Spanish and Latin American writers will still flock to New York, seeking on its streets and on that sky that overwhelmed the poet--“Murdered by the sky!" -- the answers to our today even more complex world. Poets from everywhere are always the first to ask, and Nueva York will continue to inspire questions, to unleash any postponed growing pain, and to nurture the dark zones of the Hispanic literary dream.
Diana Ferraro
UN POETA EN NUEVA YORK
por Federico Garcia Lorca
NORMA Y PARAÍSO DE LOS NEGROS
Odian la sombra del pajaro
sobre el pleamar de la blanca mejilla
y el conflicto de luz y viento
en el salón de la nieve fria.
Odian la flecha sin cuerpo,
el pañuelo exacto de la despedida,
la aguja que mantiene presión y rosa
en el grameo rubor de la sonrisa.
Aman el azul desierto,
las vacilantes expresiones bovinas,
la mentirosa luna de los polos.
la danza curva del agua en la orilla.
Con la ciencia del tronco y el rastro
llenan de nervios luminosos la arcilla
y patinan lúbricos por aguas y arenas
gustando la amarga frescura de su milenaria saliva.
Es por el azul crujiente,
azul sin un gusano ni una huella dormida,
donde los huevos de avestruz quedan eternos
y deambulan intactas las lluvias bailarinas.
Es por el azul sin historia,
azul de una noche sin temor de dia,
azul donde el desnudo del viento va quebrando
los camellos sonambulos de las nubes vacias.
Es alli donde sueñan los torsos bajo la gula de la hierba.
Alli los corales empapan la desesperación de la tinta,
los durmientes borran sus perfiles bajo la madeja de los caracoles
y queda el hueco de la danza sobre las últimas cenizas.
LA AURORA
La aurora de Nueva York
tiene cuatro columnas de cieno
y un huracan de negras palomas
que chapotean en las aguas podridas.
La aurora de Nueva York gime
por las inmensas escaleras
buscando entre las aristas
nardos de angustia dibujada.
La aurora llega y nadie la recibe en su boca
porque alli no hay mañana ni esperanza posible.
A veces las monedas en enjambres furiosos
taladran y devoran abandonados niños.
Los primeros que salen comprenden con sus huesos
que no habra parasos ni amores deshojados;
saben que van al cieno de números y leyes
a los juegos sin arte, a sudores sin fruto.
La luz es sepultada por cadenas y ruidos
en impúdico reto de ciencia sin raices.
Por los barrios hay gentes que vacilan insomnes
como recién salidas de un naufragio de sangre.
ODA A WALT WHITMAN
(extracto)
Nueva York de cieno,
Nueva York de alambres y de muerte.
Qué ¿Â¿Â¿Â¿¡ngel llevas oculto en la mejilla?
Qué voz perfecta dir¿Â¿Â¿Â¿¡ las verdades del trigo?
enemigo de la vid
y amante de los cuerpos bajo la burda tela.
Ni un solo momento, hermosura viril
que en montes de carbón, anuncios y ferrocarriles, soñabas ser un rio y dormir como un rio
con aquel camarada que pondria en tu pecho un pequeño dolor de ignorante leopardo.
A POET IN NEW YORK
by Federico Garcia Lorca
PATTERNS AND PARADISE OF THE BLACK
They hate the bird’s shadow
on the high tide of a white cheek
and the conflict of light with the wind in the lounge of cold snow.
They hate the bodyless arrow,
the precise handkerchief of a farewell,
the needle keeping the pressure and the rose on the grassy blush of a smile.
They love a blue desert,
the faltering bovine expressions,
Quién el sueño terrible de sus anémonas manchadas? the poles’ deceitful moon
the water’s winding dance on the shore.
Ni un solo momento, viejo hermoso Walt Whitman, he dejado de ver tu barba llena de mariposas,
ni tus hombros de pana gastados por la luna, ni tus muslos de Apolo virginal,
ni tu voz como una columna de ceniza; anciano hermoso como la niebla
que gemlas igual que un pajaro
con el sexo atravesado por una aguja, enemigo del stiro,
With the science of their trunk and tread they cover the clay with luminous nerves, they glide, lustful, over the waters and sand,
tasting the bitter freshness of their ancient saliva.
It’s because of the crackling blue,
a blue without a worm or a sleeping footprint, where the ostrich’s eggs dwell for eternity
Diana Ferraro
and the playful rains stroll, intact.
It’s because of the blue without history, the blue of a night without fear of day, the blue where the naked wind breaks
the sleepwalker camels of the empty clouds.
It’s there where the chests dream beneath the gluttonous grass.
There where the corals drink the ink’s despair,
the sleepers erase their profiles under the skein of the snails
and the void of the dance remains over the last ashes.
DAWN
Dawn in New York has four columns of mud and a hurricane of black doves splashing in rotten waters.
Dawn in New York groans by the immense fire escapes searching within the edges
the spikenards of a drafted anguish.
Dawn arrives and no one receives it in a mouth where there is no possible morning or hope.
Sometimes coins in furious swarms drill and devour abandoned children.
Those who go out early understand with their bones that there will be no paradises or leafless loves;
they know they will be led into a swamp of numbers and laws,
to the artless games, to the fruitless sweat.
The light is buried under chains and noise,
in the shameless challenge of a science without roots. In the boroughs there are people who teeter, sleepless, as though just escaped from a shipwreck of blood.
ODE TO WALT WHITMAN
(excerpt)
New York of sludge
New York of wires and death
Which angel do you hide in your cheek?
Which perfect voice will tell the truth of the wheat? Who the terrible dream of sullen windflowers?
Not for a single moment, old handsome Whitman, I’ve stopped seeing your beard covered by butterflies, nor your shoulders in velvet worn out by the moon, nor your thighs of a virgin Apolo,
nor your voice like a column of ashes, you, elderly man as beautiful as haze moaning like a bird
with the sex pinned by a needle, enemy of satyrs,
enemy of the vine
and lover of bodies beneath rough cloth. Not for a single moment, manly beauty, who over hills of coal, signs and railways,
dreamt of being a river and sleeping like a river
with that joyful comrade who would stick on your breast the small pain of a leopard who ignores.
(Translation:DF)